Thoughts on Politics, Technology and the world around us

The real goal of Obamacare

In recent days, I have come to a conclusion about the Affordable Care Act (2010), passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Mark Steyn wrote over the weekend:

A few years back, I too was retailing horror stories from Canadian (and British) health care — wait times, C difficile, etc. But once Nancy Pelosi & Co passed the bill and we found out what was in it, it seemed obvious that Obamacare would be far worse than the Canadian or any other First World system.

He then presented an example (one of soon to be millions) of American’s who have had their health insurance cancelled because their existing coverage doesn’t meet the legislated requirements of the ACA (such as mandatory maternity coverage, even for seniors).

A few days earlier, the same Mark Steyn wrote about how the rollout of the healthcare.gov website has been a fiasco, partly due to the complexity of the regulations and the fact they hired CGI of Montreal, who was known to have wasted billions of Canadian tax dollars on unworkable software for gun control and health records.

There has obviously been a lot of coverage on television (Fox and NBC), newspapers and online about the mess that Obamacare clearly has become and will obviously become worse. But I think many of the talking heads are missing the point. This was INTENTIONAL. Many conservatives have posited that Obama and his socialist cohorts are incompetent. For a while I suspected this was the case, because I couldn’t imagine a worse plan than what the ACA proposed.

But then I recalled what Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s former Chief of Staff, once said:

Never let a crisis go to waste.

I think this is exactly what Obama and his socialists are doing – except that they have engineered the crisis. And they have patience – they knew it would take longer than the Obama administration to achieve. Obama himself might even be a pawn, because the failure of Obamacare is a key part of the plan.

The complex regulations and failure to rollout the exchanges effectively will create a mess where many Americans who had health insurance will find themselves having to shell out significantly more for policies they don’t need. They will get frustrated. And the Left will blame the insurance industry. The left will wait until their is frothing outrage, but carefully funnel that outrage towards the insurance companies, who will be blamed for not offering the affordable insurance plans Obama promised the American people. The protestations of the insurers that they had no choice, given the constraints of the ACA will be for naught, as that argument is complex and requires rational thought. The Left’s argument will appeal to the heart and emotions on the street. In times of crisis, that always works better.

The solution, to be proposed by Obama or his successor, will be to remove the “evil” insurance companies completely, and create the state-run, single payer system of which the left dreams. To use Steyn’s title, they will create a system worse than Canada’s just so they can have a system just like the ones that Canadian’s suffer with today and which will slowly bankrupt both countries.

Alex

You know what really scares me? The left down there is into the realm of planning things so despicable that nobody believes they are really planning it. That is terrifying in the extreme. People can run around screaming “He’s Hitler! He’s going to round people up and shoot them!” all they want and nobody is a) going to believe them b) going to speak out once they realize that this is what they are living. Not that I’ve seen evidence of that exactly… but things going down there are getting really creepy and fast.

Ira

Certainly, if Obamacare was intended to do what the Obama administration claimed it was intended to do, it is very nearly the worst written piece of legislation in the world.

I do not discount this possibility. They might just be that incompetent.

If they are not, however, then it does seem likely that this fiasco was their objective all along – to create a system Americans despise, so they can then propose a solution that offers better service (as nearly any universal single-payer system currently in use would).

If they go that route, however, the Canadian system is not the one they should emulate. I would suggest Australia’s or Japan’s as a better model.

Cynicla Bard

I thought is was clear when I heard the original legislation was 2500 pages with 19000 pages of regulations to clarify it, that the whoel system was designed to be a nightmare, and to be unworkable.

Imagine car with 300 different safety devices that can shut it down at any time, for any of 300 separate reasons, or combinations thereof.

Nobody would now how to drive it and ever the guy who wrote the software would be in trouble.

The legislation and regulations would take long time to write, and must have been written before Obama was elected, likely by various lefty groups like the Center for American Progress, Its odd that the Progressives never try to explain what we are supposed to be progressing toward.

Ira

Keep in mind, this is largely how the US government works. You know how equalization works in Canada? In the US, there are 1,100 different federal programs that shuttle money back and forth between states.

The more I learn about how their government works, the happier I am that I don’t live under it.